San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection has kept a preliminary list of potentially dangerous “soft-story” buildings since 2009, but inspectors say it has not been verified by actual building inspections, and was never intended for public consumption. Some of the addresses the city generated might be wrong.

See the whole list below, or find an address by street name:

The Public Press is publishing the list (the best city record available) so that residents who might possibly be at risk in their homes can participate in the debate over how best to retrofit thousands of properties in coming years.

We are doing so against the advice of some experts, and the Department of Building Inspection itself. Wide distribution of the list, said department spokesman William Strawn, “might create anxiety and alarm” among residents in buildings that may actually turn out to be safe. But critics of the city’s approach, including Building Inspection Commission member Debra Walker, say the city needs more public pressure to move fast on a mandatory retrofit program.

In February 2007, San Francisco commissioned the Applied Technology Council, a nonprofit structural engineering organization, to inventory the buildings whose weak ground floors can collapse in an earthquake. A team of engineers, architects, city staff and graduate students walked the city, noting wood-framed apartment complexes built before 1973, with more than three floors and more than five units. The buildings all had“ openings” on 80 percent of one wall, or 50 percent of two walls.

The list flags 2,929 addresses. The city estimates those buildings house 58,000 people.

David Bonowitz, a structural engineer who participated in the study, said the list is rough, containing only buildings that resemble in the most superficial way the few buildings that collapsed in the Marina in 1989” during the Loma Prieta earthquake. Laurence Kornfield of the city’s Earthquake Safety Implementation Program said any of the buildings on the list might have already been reinforced, but that would have been impossible for the team to know.

Though San Francisco’s list has been available upon request since 2009, the city has never officially published it. A study summarizing the data but omitting the addresses, “Here Today, Here Tomorrow: The Road to Earthquake Resilience in San Francisco,” is viewable at sfcapss.org.

About the Author

Noah Arroyo is assistant editor at Public Press. He has written about housing, government, business and crime for MissionLocal.org, a U.C. Berkeley-sponsored hyperlocal news publication. He is a 2010 graduate of San Francisco State University. Twitter: @noah_arroyo

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